Robert Fisk

For other people named Robert Fiske, see Robert Fiske (disambiguation).

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Robert Fisk during a lecture at Carleton University, Canada, 2004

Robert Fisk (born July 12 1946 in Maidstone, Kent) is a British journalist and is currently a Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent. He has spent around 30 years living and reporting in the Middle East

Career

Described by the New York Times as "probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain", he has over thirty years of experience in international reporting, dating from 1970s Belfast and Portugal's 1974 Carnation Revolution, the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War, and encompassing the 1979 Iranian revolution, the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, 1991 Persian Gulf War, and 2003 Invasion of Iraq. He is the world's most-decorated foreign correspondent, having received numerous awards including the British Press Awards' International Journalist of the Year award seven times. Fisk speaks good vernacular Arabic, and is one of the few Western journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden (three times between 1994 and 1997).

In the British journalistic tradition of the foreign correspondent, Fisk has developed a personal analysis of the foreign affairs that he covers and presents them in that light, often with trenchant criticism of the British government and its allies. Fisk is a consistent critic of what he perceives as hypocrisy in British government foreign policy.

Fisk's reporting—and his bestselling books, based on his field notes and recordings— offer strong criticisms of Middle Eastern governments as well as what he perceives as hypocrisy in British and United States government foreign policy. His view of journalism is that it must "challenge authority — all authority — especially so when governments and politicians take us to war", and he quotes with approval the Israeli journalist Amira Hass: "There is a misconception that journalists can be objective ... What journalism is really about is to monitor power and the centres of power." Fisk has received widespread praise and criticism for his condemnation of violence against civilians. Speaking of the historical basis for the conflicts he has covered Fisk said, "After the allied victory of 1918, at the end of my father's war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career — in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad — watching the people within those borders burn."

Early career

Fisk received a BA in English and Classics at Lancaster University and a PhD in Political Science, awarded by Trinity College, Dublin in 1985. From 1972-75 Fisk served as Belfast correspondent for The Times, before becoming its correspondent in Portugal covering the aftermath of the 1974 revolution. He then was appointed Middle East correspondent (1976-1988). He later moved to The Independent, with his first report published there on 28 April, 1989.

As Middle East correspondent, Fisk covered the 1979 Iranian revolution, the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, and the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He was one of two Western journalists to stay in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. He was one of the first journalists to visit the scene of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. His book on the conflict, Pity The Nation, was first published in 1990. Fisk has also reported on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the conflicts in Kosovo and Algeria.

Osama bin Laden, 9/11, and the war in Afghanistan

Fisk is one of the few Western journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden - three times (all published by The Independent: December 6 1993, July 10 1996, and March 22 1997). During one of Fisk's interviews with Bin Laden, Fisk noted an attempt by Bin Laden to possibly recruit him. Bin Laden said, "Mr Robert, one of our brothers had a dream. He dreamed ... that you were a spiritual person ... this means you are a true Muslim." Fisk replied, "Sheikh Osama, I am not a Muslim ... I am a journalist". Bin Laden and Adam Gadahn, an alleged Al-Qaeda spokesman and translator of American birth, have apparently mentioned Robert Fisk in speeches. Osama bin Laden said Fisk's reporting was "neutral". According to a MEMRI report, on September 2, 2006, in a videotaped statement, Adam Gadahn said that Fisk and George Galloway have a "respect and admiration for Islam," have "sympathy for Muslims their causes", and added "I say to them, isn't it time you stopped sitting on the fence and came over to the side of truth?". .

Fisk has condemneed the September 11, 2001 attacks, describing the actions of the "9/11 killers" as a "hideous crime against humanity." In the aftermath of 9/11, he called for an honest discussion to understand the motives behind the attacks: a discussion which he claims was not occuring in the Western press . He believes that Al Qaeda ordered the attacks in response to U.S. policies in the Middle East, particularly its support for Israel. He has questioned the approach offered by President Bush, who did not take into acount foreign policy and instead claimed that the perpetrators of 9/11 did it because "they hate our freedoms."

After the U.S. launched its attack on Afghanistan shortly after the September 11 2001 attacks, Fisk was for a time transferred to Pakistan to provide coverage of that conflict. While reporting from there, he was attacked and beaten by a group of Afghan refugees but was also saved from this attack by another Afghan refugee. In his graphic account of his own beating, published in The Independent of December 10 2001, Fisk excused the attackers of responsibility ("I couldn't blame them for what they were doing,") and said that, in his view, their "brutality was entirely the product of others, of us — of we who had armed their struggle against the Russians and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then armed and paid them again for the 'War for Civilisation' just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them 'collateral damage.'"

In August 2007 Fisk publicly expressed, for the first time, doubts about the historical record of the September 11 attacks. In an article for The Independent, he raised such concerns as missing aircraft parts, the melting point of steel, the collapse of 7 World Trade Center, and other familiar criticisms that have circulated within the 9/11 Truth Movement, although he said that many other criticisms were "crazed".

Iraq War

During the 2003 Iraq War, Fisk was stationed in Baghdad and filed many eyewitness reports. He has criticized other journalists based in Iraq for what he calls their "hotel journalism", literally reporting from one's hotel room without interviews or first hand experience of events.

In February 2008 it was reported that he had discovered a biography of Saddam Hussein, purporting to have been written by Fisk, even though this was clearly a forgery.

Awards

In 1991, Fisk won a Jacob's Award for his RTÉ Radio coverage of the first Gulf War. He received Amnesty International UK Press Awards in 1998 for his reports from Algeria and again in 2000 for his articles on the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999. He received the British Press Awards' International Journalist of the Year seven times, and twice won its "Reporter of the Year" award.. More recently, Fisk was awarded the 2006 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize along with $350,000.

He was made an honorary Doctor of Laws by the University of St Andrews on June 24 2004. The Political and Social Sciences department of Ghent University (Belgium) awarded Fisk an honorary doctorate on March 24 2006. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate by the American University of Beirut in June 2006.

The Great War for Civilisation

Dust jacket of The Great War for Civilisation, 2005 (UK edition)

Publishers Weekly said this about Fisk's 2005 book The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East

Combining a novelist's talent for atmosphere with a scholar's grasp of historical sweep, foreign correspondent Fisk has written one of the most dense and compelling accounts of recent Middle Eastern history yet. Fisk possesses deep knowledge of the broader history of the region, which allows him to discuss the Armenian genocide of 1915, the 2002 destruction of Jenin, and the battlefields of Iraq with equal aplomb. But it is his stunning capacity for visceral description—he has seen, or tracked down firsthand accounts of, all the major events of the past 25 years—that makes this volume unique. Some of the chapters contain detailed accounts of torture and murder, which more squeamish readers may be inclined to skip, but such scenes are not gratuitous. They are designed to drive home Fisk's belief that "war is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death."

Gary Kamiya, a writer for Salon.com wrote that,

Fisk's eyewitness reports from the killing fields are more than just bang-bang accounts: They are implacable and indispensable documents, grim reminders of what actually happens when nations go to war. And his devastating analysis of the reasons for those wars exposes the sins not just of the West, but of the Arab world as well. Fisk is a polemicist, but his anger derives from a Swiftian humanism. He is appalled by official lies and hypocrisy and driven to show, in nightmarish detail, the human suffering and death that results from them. And if he emphasizes and perhaps at times overemphasizes the culpability of the powerful—in particular of America and Israel—that perspective is not just excusable, but much needed in an intimidated intellectual climate in which received positions have gone largely unchallenged.

Criticism

Fisk's reporting and commentary style has made him the object of criticism, to the extent that some bloggers have coined the blogosphere term fisking ("a point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or a news story"). Robert Fisk has been greatly criticized by the Irish columnist and Senator Eoghan Harris. Harris has written, "I think he does us a favour by being so forthright. For my money his analysis of Middle East politics is a first cousin to believing that aliens take away people in Flying Saucers".[2]

In an essay titled, "Why does John Malkovich want to kill me?", Fisk states that he and other journalists who criticize U.S. and Israeli policy in the Middle East will have to deal with hate mail and death threats. In that essay, he refers to actor John Malkovich's remark in May 2002 at the Cambridge Union Society, when asked who he would like to fight to the death, that he would rather just shoot Fisk.

The Guardian columnist Simon Hoggart (also a former Northern Ireland reporter) has leveled criticism at Fisk for being, "dreadfully pessimistic" since 9/11, because of his predictions that "the (actions of the) West (in response to 9/11) was about to bring total disaster upon its own head". Hoggart also cites claims brought forward in commentary submitted by Fisk over the years, specifically that "a group of British soldiers lost in the desert" meant that Desert Storm would fail, and that the bombing campaign during the Kosovo crisis would "only make things worse" . While acknowledging "his brilliant and vivid reporting", Hoggart stated in 2001 that Fisk's pessimism reveals judgement that is, "not just mistaken, but reliably mistaken".

Ethan Bronner, in a New York Times review of Fisk's book, The Great War for Civilisation argues that Fisk is "most passionate and least informed about Israel," pursues his agenda "nearly to the exclusion of the pursuit of straight journalism" and allows his points to be "warped by his perspective."

According to Irish journalist Sean Gannon, writing in FrontPage Magazine, Fisk's narrative, "great swathes of which consist of verbatim regurgitations of previously filed reports...and toe-curling errors of fact, is shaped almost entirely by the highly-partisan historical and political perspectives Osama bin Laden described in November 2004 as 'neutral'." For Fisk, he writes, "the real axis of evil comprises, not the terror-sponsoring, WMD-seeking dictatorships of the world, but the "Likudist" establishment in Jerusalem, Washington's neo-conservative cabals and the 'international Zionist lobby'."[3]

Israeli historian Efraim Karsh, in a book review in Commentary Magazine, commented on what he saw as Fisk's carelessness with facts: "It is difficult to turn a page of The Great War for Civilisation without encountering some basic error".

The pro-Israel Boston-based media watchdog CAMERA has criticised Fisk on a number of occasions for things he has written or said. In one case, they criticised Fisk for quoting an Israeli journalist who said that "[Israeli PM Menachem] Begin described [the Palestinians] in a speech in the Knesset as 'beasts walking on two legs'." In the cited speech, Begin was speaking about terrorists who wish to harm Israeli children, and did not mention the Palestinians at all.[4][5] CAMERA has also criticized Fisk for what they interpreted as an assertion from Fisk that journalistic objectivity is no longer relevant to the Middle East.

Works

• The Point of No Return: The Strike which Broke the British in Ulster (1975). London: Times Books/Deutsch. ISBN 0-233-96682-X
• In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality, 1939-1945 (2001). London: Gill & Macmillan. ISBN 0-7171-2411-8 — (1st ed. was 1983).
• Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (3rd ed. 2001). London: Oxford University Press; xxi, 727 pages. ISBN 0-19-280130-9 — (1st ed. was 1990).
• The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East (October 2005) London. Fourth Estate; xxvi, 1366 pages. ISBN 1-84115-007-X

Forgeries misattributed to Robert Fisk

• Saddam Hussein - From Birth to Martyrdom (2007). Egypt: Ibda; 272 pages. (forged authorship)

External links

• The Independent,The newspaper which Fisk currently writes for.
• Robert-Fisk.com unofficial archive of Fisk articles.
• Robert Fisk on Shakespeare and war
• [6]Collections of Fisk's global speaking engagement